Anxious neighbours of Willy Cleave, the Devon farmer whose cattle were found to have foot and mouth disease on Sunday, were shaking their heads in disbelief at his "bad luck."

But as the disaster deepened, it became harder to blame it all on bad luck. And there were calls from consumer groups for a radical rethink of our policy on food and farming.

Mr Cleave, with his big business complex of farms, livestock transporting, dealing and exporting was beginning to look more like a symbol of everything that disturbs people about today's agriculture. The deadly virus might have blown in on a breeze, but this was British farming policy reaping the whirlwind - and consumers were saying enough is enough.

"Ordinary people can see the enormity of this. There is a powerful and growing sense that things cannot go on like this," said Tim Lang, professor of food policy at Thames Valley University. "Why does British farming keep churning up crises like these? It isn't working."

Protests at modern farming methods were popping up everywhere, he added, "whether it's the animal welfare movement in the UK, the slow food movement in Italy or the sense in France that the balance is all wrong."

People are already finding ways round the industrialised system. Farmers' markets, where producers sell direct to the public have proved enormously popular.

Whenever there is a food crisis, independent specialist retailers see a surge in interest. Roger Kelsey, a butcher in Shenfield, Essex, a few miles from the Cheale abattoir where the outbreak of foot and mouth disease was first confirmed, says customers are showing more and more interest in what they buy and where it comes from.

"I know all about where my meat was reared, how it lived, and where it was slaughtered. You can't get that in the supermarkets."

Mr Kelsey uses a small abattoir near Chelmsford, even though Cheale's is just down the road, because it is a small operation with craft skills and it is closer to the farms where he gets his supplies. That means the animals do not have to travel so far, which is better for them but also because it minimises the stress, and means that the quality of the meat is better.

Sales of organic foods have grown faster than anyone could have anticipated and are up 40% year on year.

Mike Collins, of the Soil Association, said: "When you are dealing with organic food that hasn't been imported, the emphasis is very much on keeping it local, where the supply chain is at its most simple and people can have real confidence in what they are eating."

But a movement back to buying locally from specialists - often a pleasurable foraging activity for those with money to spare rather than shopping for essentials - will not on its own bring signficant change. Organic food still accounts for only 1% of the total UK food market, and much of it has to be imported.

Sustain, the alliance for better farming and food, says the radical redirection consumers want can be brought about by switching the huge subsidies we pay through government and the EU to help those who farm in a different way.

Policy director Vicki Herd says subsidies could be earned by those who, instead of supporting mass production, agree to farm in a way that protects the environment, provides healthy food and work locally.

Mr Lang has a longer shopping list to bring about real change. Nick Brown, the agriculture minister, has asked experts about a radical review. At national level Mr Lang thinks that means redefining the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff) so that healthy food becomes its core role, and instead of promoting agriculture its focus shifts to rural affairs. That requires joined-up thinking on transport and town planning, so that people can walk comfortably to local shops and so that the poor are not excluded.

At a local level, the regional development agencies could help to rebuild a local supply and local consumption chain by marketing British produce to Britain instead of just abroad.

But people also need to think about how much they pay for their food. "You can't have cheap beans in a supermarket shed on the ring road and a vibrant, diverse local market," he says.

Professor Richard Lacey, of Leeds University, similarly has no time for Maff's cautious inquiries into possible links between the intensification of farming and the spate of food crises. (He was the eminent microbiologist who as far back as 1988 suggested that humans could catch CJD from eating meat carrying BSE. He was pilloried for his pains.)

"We can attribute foot and mouth directly to our industrialised agriculture and food system," he said. The immediate key to it in his mind is the centralised production. "If you have local food and local shops, things may go wrong but they don't spread like this." But for things to get better, we are going to have to change our attitude to food.

The whole post-war philosophy for farming has been "a preoccupation with an abundance of cheap food, and particularly cheap meat, and government has put in the mechanisms in the form of subsidies and regulation to produce it." If people want safer, nutritionally better, ethically better food, they will have to pay more. "If people ate less, but more expensive meat and replaced some of it with more cereals, rice, fruit and vegetables, overall the cost to them would probably remain about the same," he argues.

At a European level, the thorniest obstacle to change is reform of the common agriculture policy. But even here there seems to be a new mood, with the Germans and French, like us, forced into soul-searching by the recent farming crises.

Tim Lang is optimistic. "This is a historic moment. We are talking about a dramatic cultural change. This is about the quality, pace and scale of people's lives."